Seruku

Seruku is a new personal search tool, and (surprise!) according to its acknowledgements, it’s powered by Lucene. Along with Furl, Lookout, and others, Lucene is sure getting around…

desktop search

It seems Google will soon launch a desktop search product. It will be interesting to see if this takes off. In the past I don’t think most folks had enough stuff on their desktops that they really needed a search tool to find things. But perhaps we’ve reached the tipping point.

watchdog

In an article on Yahoo’s paid inclusion, Danny Sullivan notes that the Google Watch guy has now launched a Yahoo Watch site. He’s a bit rabid. On one hand it is good to have folks to keep a critical eye on search engines, but I wonder, does this sort of borderline paranoia really help the cause?

niches

I a discussion of niche directories someone asks:

Imagine then many good niche directories tapped through lets say an open source search portal?

But maybe instead of a single portal, what’s needed are lots of niche search engines. (Nutch is a natural for either application…) One could crawl a bit from the pages listed in the directory, and maybe even implement a link analysis algorithm which scores pages by how well they are linked to the original directory.

new Lucene release

I just made a new release of Lucene. There are some cool new features in 1.4, like span searching, result sorting, and term vectors. There are also some optimizations which should make searches faster, lots of bug fixes, etc.